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0:17
- All right, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you Henry for the very cool introduction. Thank you Henry. I always have to start when Henry's in the room to just always acknowledge him, because I think we come from such ahistorical culture where we forget that our intellectual formation is part of a lineage. And the lineage that I come from absolutely, Henry has been absolutely central to my political formation and my intellectual formation. And so with that, Henry thank you,
0:58
thank you for everything that you do and everything that you've done, and the ways that you've supported my work. And if it wasn't for you, the truth be, I wouldn't of never had a first book, and maybe never would've had anything published. Which what I want to say to that is that the issue of solidarity is important in this work because it is such a hard, hard labor, and that often we forget how important it is that, that we make those kind of connections. So and we make those connections
1:29
as embodied practice. So I'm very happy to be here today. Thank you Jenny for just incredible coordination of all of this. All right so I'm going to begin with, with several quotes that I think begin to kind of set the tone. The first one is by Merleau Ponty who stated that the body is a medium for having a world, and Michel Foucault who said that the body is also directly involved in a political field. Power relations have an immediate hold upon it,
2:00
they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. And of course our beloved Paulo Freire said I know with my entire body, with feelings, with passion and also with reason. It is my entire body that socially knows I cannot in the name of exactness and rigor negate my body, my emotions, and my feelings. In pedagogy and the politics of body Cheryl Shapiro, as other feminists theorists before her
2:30
contends that any approach committed to human liberation must seriously address the body as a site for both oppression and liberation. Yet seldom is the significance of the body made central to discussion of emancipatory pedagogy. As such education efforts to reinvent the social and material conditions within classrooms are often devoid of close consideration to the significance of the flesh in mediating conditions of teaching and learning. That is unless the discussion turns
2:59
to classroom management, a convenient euphemism for both the covert and overt regulation and control of student corporality. Meanwhile the classroom exists as an arena where abstract knowledge and its constructions are objectified, along with the students, who are expected to acquiesce to its alienating function, limiting rationality, and technocratic instrumentalisation. Hence the production of knowledge is neither engaged not presented as a historical and collective process
3:29
occurring in the flesh, and all its central capacities for experiencing and responding to the world. Instead, as Christopher Becky argues in Wicked Bodies, the flesh, the material aspect of the body, is seen as a hinderance which must be overcome negated and transcended, as if it were not involved in the act of knowing at all. But we as teachers, as folks who spend lots of time with students in classrooms, know that teaching and learning can invoke a multitude
3:59
of sensations and responses, including excitement, pain, joy, anger, pride, and frustration. With this clearly in mind, Freire often referred to these very human responses when he considered the process of studying. He said, studying is a demanding occupation in the process of which we will encounter pain, pleasure, victory, defeat, doubt, and happiness, all physical sensations of the body. the notion of students as embodied and integral human beings has received limited attention in discussions
4:33
of classroom practice within the United States. An integral engagement with different faculties of our humanity. Missing even in multicultural discussions of pedagogy are more complex understandings of our humanity and the significance of a body to intellectual formation. Generally such discussions have been left to those educators whose tendency has been to overemphasize the role of subjectivity or fallen to over-psychologizing of the self. So no matter how well meaning they may be,
5:03
this view often fails to address the material conditions and issues of power and privilege that are at work in the lives of historically disenfranchised students. The historical absence of the body has been so because bring the body into critical discussion is considered potentially disruptive and subversive. To the social school, order of schooling. Grounded in such a world view, many educators assume that teaching and learning are solely cognitive acts.
5:31
And as such teachers need not concern themselves with the physical nature of their students, unless one is deemed as inappropriate at which time officials or psychologists or policemen are summoned to evaluate and hopefully fix the problem with the student. To support students of becoming full subjects of history then Freire urged teachers to grapple with the fact that students construct knowledge through the multitude of collective interactions of the body with the world.
5:59
Amanda Sinclair reminds us the immediate impact of a person's body on another is profound. A great deal happens before a person even opens their mouth, emotions are aroused, judgments are made, comfort or discomfort levels are established well in advance of verbal communication. We unconsciously or consciously register and make judgments about stature, about voice. Bodies elicit feelings of excitement and admiration, attraction and desire, envy and distaste.
6:30
The material conditions and history's the students are made visible on the body. Their history of survival are often witnessed in their skin, their teeth, their hair, their gestures, their speech, and the movement of their arms and legs, in a myriad of ways bodies are maps of power and identity. If this is so then teachers must work to engage students' physical realities more substantively in an effort to forge an emancipatory practice of education.
6:57
It's not enough to rely on abstract learning processes where only the analysis of words and text are privilege in the construction of knowledge. Such an educational process is one of estrangement, it functions to alienate students from the natural world around them, from themselves and from one another. Hence teachers and students must labor in the flesh, that is to say teaching and learning must be anchored in the material understanding of our human existence
7:25
as a starting place for classroom practice and our struggle to reinvent the world. Freire again argues that this is vital to a critical pedagogy in that we learn things about the world by acting and changing the world around us. It is through the process of change, of transforming the material world from which we emerge where creation of the cultural and historical world takes place. This transformation of the world is done by us while it makes and remakes us.
7:54
However there's nothing automatic about social change. Nor is it a process that can solely rely on calculating logic or cold rationality. When the body sanctioned forces overwhelmingly shape our experiences and responses to social structures. So too struggles in the name of social justice must whole step the fullness of our human existence. In our efforts then to understand the process of teaching and learning there has to be acknowledged that it exists as human labor, and it takes place
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within our bodies and the totality of our being, as we strive to make sense of the material conditions and social relations of power that shape our particular histories. In teaching to transgress Balhooks speaks to this issue. I have always been acutely aware of the presence of my body in those settings that in fact invite us to invest so deeply in a mind body split, so that in essense you're almost always at odds with the existing structure, whether you are a black woman student or a professor.
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But if you want to remain, you've got in a sense to remember yourself because to remember yourself is to see yourself always as a body in a system that has not become accustomed to your presence or to your physicality. Through such an understanding teaching can begin to build practices of education where students are not being asked to confront themselves and each other as strangers, but rather as fully embodied human beings from the moment that they enter the classroom.
9:23
This is to say that a critical practice of the body must seek to contend in the flesh with the embodied histories of the disenfranchised, as well as the social and material forces that shape the conditions in which we teach and learn. Freire again speaks to the undeniable centrality of the body in the act of knowing. The importance of the body is indisputable. The body moves, it acts, it rememorizes the struggle for liberation, the body in some desires
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points out, renounces, protests, curves itself, rises, designs, and remakes the world, and its importance has to do with a certain sensualism contained by the body even in connection with cognitive ability. It affords to separate, that it affords to separate the rigorous act of knowing the world from the body's passionate ability to know. I'm a little thrown off because the slides are a little turned, thrown off, so I'm trying to wonder what the heck has happened. But anyway, I'll continue.
10:22
We'll figure it out Jenny, together. But it is precisely the centralism that Freire was talking about with its revolutionary potential. We don't, you know sometimes we don't stop to think that the revolutionary process is essential process. It's a process that requires all of our presence. With its revolutionary potential then to nurture self-determination, the empowerment of students as both individuals and social beings, which is systematically stripped away
10:48
from the educational process of public schools. Most teachers already well versed in maintaining this grey world of unsexy knowing are well placed to take up the challenge of policing expressions of passion, excitement, and physicality within the classroom, particularly when teaching with youth. Conservative ideologies of social control historically linked to Puritanical, and now we're on the right side, Puritanical views of the body as evil, central pleasures as sinful, and passions
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as corrupting to the sanctity of the spirit continue to be reflected in the narrow ruled based pedagogical policies and practices of schooling today. The sensuality of the body is discouraged in schools through the prominent practice of immobilizing students' bodies within hard chairs and desks that contain and restrict their contact with each other and the environment around them. Vivian Leroy contends that the body is not usually granted a lot of space in our education system.
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It is nothing more than what allows us to remain seated for hours and to move from one classroom to another and to meet the requirements. 90 percent of the time spent in school is typically in a state of immobility. Learning is reduced to an airborne exchange of knowledge between different minds. The knowledge of the teacher's mind is transmitted to the learners defined as mind able to receive new knowledge or not. Leroy further argues that this tradition of fettered bodies is anchored
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in three paradigmatic figures, Socrates, Christianity, and Pavlov's dog. In the classic tradition the sensual body is quickly subordinated to the mind where ideas are privileged over the senses. In Christianity, the separation between the body and the soul constitutes an essential pedagogical concern. In the Pavlovian model, the body is transformed into an instrumentalized object to be manipulated and controlled through external stimuli in the process of learning.
12:45
Every time I read this I remember when my kids were young, and it was during the time when in Elementary school what they would do with the kids is they would give them M&Ms if they answered the questions right. It was kind of behaviorist approach in education. And of course then they would use the stars, you get a star if you. And I mean essentially that's what grades are all about. We don't quite make that connection but in fact that's what's going on. Such a view of teaching and learning
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ultimately lead to pedagogical practices that do emotional and psychological violence to the orature of the body and the annihilation of the flesh in the traditional rubric of the classroom. Accordingly inequalities are reproduced through class, rationalized, gendered, and heterosexist perceptions and distortions of male and female bodies. Perceptions and distortions embodied within the pedagogy of even the most well meaning teachers. Consequently students from communities
13:41
where the sense is in the body and its spontaneities are given greater primacy in the act of knowing and being, they are often coerced into sacrificing the knowledge of their body's sensuality, their creativity and vitality, in favor of an atomized analytical and instrumental logic of being. In light of this, we as teachers need to reflect on what bodies we give permission to in our classrooms and the extent to which we let those bodies speak. Such reflections may be, for example they're key
14:12
to explaining the overwhelming tendency of teachers and school officials to label and African American and Chicano boys for example as hyperactive or suffering from attention deficit disorder. Similarly Susan O'Brien argues, and that slide really around the issue of disconnection, and what we find is that in fact the longer that the students are in school, you begin to see the increasing disconnection and the lack of affiliation they feel with schools themselves. Similarly Susan O'Brien argues
14:47
that the corporal, physical, and sexual realms are unwelcome intrusions into the every day world of the classroom. The systematic disembodiment of students within the process of learning begins early in their academic formation. Despite child development theories that assert that human beings are sexual beings even before birth, sexuality as an ever present phenomena systematically repressed and denied within the four walls of the classroom. This is the case even in puberty
15:15
when adolescent bodies are particularly sensitive to heightened and confusing sensations. Seldom do teachers, many who are not particularly comfortable with their own sexuality, critically engage questions of sexuality beyond the often repeated cliche of raging hormones to connote teenage sexuality. Meanwhile students are not only pedagogically abandoned but are left to the mercy of the media and corporate pirates that very deliberately and systematically prey upon the field
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of powerful bodily sensations, emotions, and stirrings of youth. Henry Jarue argues that in the slick world of advertising, teenage bodies are sought after for the exchange value they generate in marketing and adolescence sexuality that offers a marginal exoticism and ample pleasures for the largely male consumer. Commodification reaffirms and fixates the complexity of youth, and the range of possible identities they might assume while simultaneously exploiting them
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as fodder for the logic of the market place. Frightened by their own ambivalence and the physicality of student bodies, educational policy makers institute practices that coerce teachers into silence, rigidly limiting discussion of one of the most significant aspects of humanity. And despite the difficulties and hardships that such silence portends for many students, isolation and increasing rates of suicide for example among LGBT students, schools much like churches,
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act as moral leaders, policing and repressing the body's participation. The minimalist approach of US schools in the area of human sexuality can be contrasted with other parts of the world where straightforward facts about the birds and bees are considered a pedagogical imperative. In Sweden for example, compulsory sex education has been in place since 1956, given that recognition of sex as a natural human act, and the frank acknowledgement that most people become sexually active
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before they're 20 years old. Toward this end students learn at the early age about their sexuality, reinforcing a more open and positive view of sex and the body. Curriculum begins at age six with anatomy, and from twelve on topics are more geared towards developing tools for responsibility in their sexual lives, in the sense of ownership of their bodies. The outcome is that Sweden's rate of pregnancy and sexual transmitted, of teen pregnancy and sexual transmitted diseases,
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is among the lowest in the world. So what we see in Sweden is absolutely the opposite of the myth that if you talk about sexuality with youth, that somehow you know, they're just going to, they're going to get pregnant and all this kind of stuff. I mean it's just, it's just absolutely the opposite the way the myths work in our societies, right. The issue of teen pregnancy also illustrates how schooling practices and policies associated to the body are inextricably
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tied to gendered ideologies of power and control. Sinclair reminds us that schools like institutions are only able to assimilate women's bodies so long as they conform to a neutral or a desexualized form. Young teen mothers violate this norm by drawing attention to their femaleness, their sexuality, and their difference from the male norm. Hence teen pregnancy is addressed by exiling these young women from the school campus to an alternate location, often silenced and unseen,
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while the young fathers are left virtually untouched by the same system. And I want to tell you as a teenage mom, I was 16 years old when I, with my son. And I was not allowed to stay in the High School. The consequence was, not only was I exiled from my school community, I ended up in this little, tiny community where the truth, my education, my opportunities for education then also plummeted even further. Missing even in the University is the willingness
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to contend with the sexuality of students in the process of their academic formation, despite the fact that intense desires are often played out in the University classroom. In keeping the mind, body, spirit, pardon me, keeping the mind body split, educators readily ignore the manner in which learning works, at a visceral and a sensual level. Consequently the severing of the body's desires and sensations for the construction of knowledge interferes dramatically with students'
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capacity for self knowledge. Similarly such practices also thwart our knowledge of the other, rendering us alienated and estranged to any human suffering that exists outside of the particular and limited scope of our own identities, whether linked to gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or skin color. In fact, Spender argues that the absence of pedagogical engagement with the body can inhibit the development of empathy and respect for those who are deemed as others. And I mean I have colleagues
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who are doing this work around compassion, and they, as they talk to teachers what they find is that often teachers think that they're expressing the same level of compassion to all their students, but in fact what they're finding in their research is that white teachers express far more compassion towards white children than they do to children of color. The interesting thing is that in terms of teachers of color, they did not find that same correlation.
20:48
And it may be because people are positioned differently and our survival, you know, the issues with respect to our own survival create a different way to responding to different social context. Students outside are objectified, alienated, and domesticated into passive roles. And of course this, we know that if we think of the classroom as a place where the possibility for democracy exists, and the issue of citizenship is central, the question always becomes what kind of citizenship?
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In what ways are we preparing students for citizenship? Is it an active citizenship with criticality or is it one that in fact teaches them to be domesticated and passive? Schools discourage us all from thinking about the body. This now only interferes, this not only interferes with their achievement, but also sabotages their social agency. This is particularly visible when existing emotional, physical needs of students are ignored in an overriding effort
21:52
to obtain their obedience and their conformity. Yet in spite of major institutional efforts to control the body's desire, pleasures, and mobility within schools and classrooms, students seldom surrender their bodies completely or readily to authoritarian practices. Practices which in themselves provide the impetus for resistance. Instead many students engage in the construction of their own cultural forms of resistance which may or may not always function in their best interest.
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More often than not expressions of student resistance are enacted through counter culture, alterations to the body, be they clothing, hairstyle, posturing, manner of walking, way of speaking, piercing, tattooing of the body. These represent not only acts of resistance, but alternative ways of experiencing and knowing the world. Generally perceived by officials as both transgressive and disruptive to the social order. Such views of students are exacerbated by what Jeruid contends is a new form
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of representational politics that has emerged in media culture, fueled by degrading and visual depictions of youth as criminal, sexual, decadent, drug crazed, and illiterate. In short, youth are viewed as a growing threat to the public order. Teachers whose bodies are similarly restricted, alienated, and domesticated in their workplace are under enormous pressure to follow strict policies and procedures for classroom conduct, while expected to dispense prepackaged carricula
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instead of employing more creative and critical approaches grounded in the actual needs of their students. Given the impact of disembodied practices, teachers generally experience an uphill battle in meeting standardized mandates which systematically extricates students' bodies from the equation of their own learning. Nowhere is this more apparent than in low income schools across the nation where teaching to the test has become the carricula of choice, even at many colleges and universities.
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Along with teaching to the tests, we have the notion, you know notions of gender and sexuality and race, are deeply sedimented into the body and highly resistant to change within that context. This constitutes knowledge that is habitual, unexamined. Its outcome includes repressive educational policies and practice that marginalizes the knowledge and languages of oppressed populations and infantilizes-- It's hard see, when you have a second language, it doesn't matter how long,
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it's still difficult at times to pronounce. It infantilizes adult students, it criminalizes youth of color, it can you know, it considers suspicious ideas or uses of the body perceived as existing somehow outside of that narrow, mainstream view of normalcy. Even when teachers struggle within the classroom to implement more liberating strategies, they're often forced to become masters of deception, saying what the principal or district office wants to hear right, while doing behind closed doors
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what they believe is more democratic. Unfortunately having to shoulder the hidden physical stress of such duplicity can drive some of the most effective teachers away from the field irrespective of their political commitment. And we see this time and time again with, I don't know what it's like in Canada, but in the US the high attrition rate of teachers is, it's incredible. You know, right now all these studies that show many teachers don't get past the first five years.
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What cannot be overlooked here is the manner in which authoritarian practices are designed to not only blindfold students and lead them to a domesticated future, but also to alienate and estrange teachers from their labor. Concerned with the need to restore greater freedom, joy, creativity in their classrooms, Freire urged teachers to critically reject their domesticated role and work to challenge the authoritarianism of standard policies and practices of pedagogy, curriculum,
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and school administration. Thus he argued this required an open process of dialogue. For in classrooms with the doors closed, it is difficult to have the world unveiled. And often teachers will say, well you know I just close my door. But even that, closing the door, and trying to do what we can in the classroom is not enough. We have to move across and we have to move out of our classrooms and deal with larger issues that are having an impact on what happens in our schools.
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A critical practice of the body is also salient to rethinking University education where there seems to be little pedagogical tolerance for the emotional needs of adult learners. Somewhere in the intellectual history of the west there developed the wrong hidden idea that the mind and heart are antagonist. That scholarship must be divested of emotions, that spiritual journeys must somehow be avoided in terms of intellectual concerns. This tradition sets an expectation
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that professors and students compartmentalize themselves within the classroom without any serious concern for the manner in which the very essence of University education is often tied to major moments of life transition. Students are asked to make major intellectual commitments and material investments related to the direction of their very uncertain futures. Simultaneously students are expected to engage their studies and their research as objective impartial of service
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even when the object of their study is intimately lien to conditions of human suffering. Friedi further argues that the traditional academic expectation of the University reinforces pedagogical myths. Such as that feelings corrupt, research and its findings that intuition should be feared, that emotion and passion should be negated, and that science and technology should rule. These myths end in convincing many that the more neutral we are in our actions,
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the more objective and efficient we will be in our knowing. Hence students are slowly but surely socialized to labor as uncritical, descriptive, neutral scholars, dispassionate and disembodied in their intellectual constructions of the world. Critical principles that then support a pedagogy of the body oblige educators to be cognizant of the largest social, political, and economic conditions that shape their lives and the lives of students. In summary, these overlapping critical principles
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that I just want to put out very quickly are as follows. First, that the emotional and physical responses and experiences of students within the process of teaching and learning are engaged and must be engaged as meaningful indicators of strengths and challenges that students face in their intellectual formation and the development of their social consciousness. That knowledge is understood as historical and collective process emanating from the body's relationship to the world.
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The body is then primary in the construction of knowledge and development of moral thought, or as Connol reminds us, in the reality of practice the body is never outside of history. The body and its cognitive capacities are understood as only one medium for the construction of knowledge, hence students are seen as intricate human beings whose minds, body, hearts, and spirits are implicated in the process of their intellectual formation. Knowing is derived from the body's collective interaction
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with the world, it constitutes a significant dimension of a critical education practice. Classroom and community relationships, materials, activities must reflect this knowledge through an ongoing process of cultural integration. Spaces are created within classrooms and communities for students to contribute to the aesthetics of the physical surroundings, including the social and material conditions of their knowledge construction, peer relationships,
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exercise of their voice, and ways of participation. There's a tendency to not think about the ways that we construct classrooms so that students never feel any sense of ownership. So they feel no sense of ownership even in what they're learning and what they're engaging. Teachers create meaningful interactions and activities within classrooms and communities that must support students in grappling honesty with attentions of difference and their consequences.
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And these are differences that are enacted through the body. The knowledge that teacher have of their own body including their sexuality is an important aspect of their ability to interact effectively and to competently educate diverse student populations. Acts of resistance tied to the body can signal meaningful alternative ways of knowing and relating to the world. Conditions are created for students to reflect, affirm, and challenge the meaning of their acts of resistance in their lives.
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In ways that they become radicalized, and this notion of radicalized, Freire would engage this question of radicalization as an important aspect of becoming political in the world, to understand that issues of power were constantly at work in our lives. Spaces are created within classrooms and communities for students to contribute, I think I read, I think I'm done with these. So these principles signal a critical practice of body that's linked to the process
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of decolonizing the mind, and the heart from educational and social constraints that repressed the development of voice, that disrupt democratic participation, and thwart the self-determination of oppressed populations. This entails rewriting the body into our understanding of pedagogy through calling forth the establishment of new social, political, and economic conditions, which also require an embodied emancipatory political vision. So teaching is not just about what happens in the classroom,
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in fact teaching and our work in schools and universities has to be linked to a political project. So forging an emancipatory vision of schooling calls us all back to our bodies. In a world where all aspects of our daily life, birth death marriage, family school work leisure parenthood, spirituality, and even entertainment are more monitored and controlled. And that's the world that we live in, all aspects of our life are monitored and controlled and to a certain extent surveilled.
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The historical colonization of our bodies has left many of us numb and alienated and fragmented, defenseless at the mercy of capitalism. The consequence, as Richard Brojo reminds us has a deep sense of personal and collective dissatisfaction generated by a marketplace that cannot satisfy human needs of the body. Needs that can only be met through the relationships that break the alienation and isolation so prevalent in our lives today. Through integrating principles that sustain
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a critical practice of the body, teachers can begin to create a space in which emotional intimacy can thrive, nourishing more effectively academic growth and human connection among our students. This sense of intimacy is an important one, because often there isn't a lot of conversation about the importance of intimacy in our relationships with students. And what I mean by that is that students feel connected so there's a sense that when we're trying, we're involved in the act of teaching,
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that it's an act that is a relational act, and that in the process we both need to be involved, we both need to be invested. And often we don't invest unless we feel some sense of connection, trust, and intimacy in the process. Terry Eagleton urges us to recognize that the origin of emancipatory possibility and human solidarity resides squarely in the body. For it is through the collective interactions of integral bodies within the classroom that the possibility of moral thought can be awaken.
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This constitutes a very important aspect of our pedagogy since it is moral thought that places are collective bodies back into history and into the political discourse. More over it's the absence of a truly democratic moral language and practice of the body that stifles our capacity for social struggle today. For example, many students across the country bemoan, many teachers and educators bemoan justifiably so that the conditions that have been created by the privatization of education
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and accountability regimes of high stakes testing and standardized knowledge which negative have impact, not only education of students, but also teachers labors. I mean they bemoan but essentially what we're dealing with is that besides their frustrations educators struggle to communicate any kind of a clear, coherent, emancipatory moral message to challenge the shallow economist moralism of neoliberalism. So teachers are complaining about the testing, they know that--
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Nine out of ten teachers I talk about, with respect that I've talked to with respect to testing, they will absolutely say that they see the problems with testing. Some will say, you know it's one of those evils you have to put up with. Others say that it absolutely ruins their capacity to teach in the classroom, and yet we've not been able to create an education movement that engages these questions related to neoliberalism and its impact on the lives of our students and in the lives
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of teachers themselves with respect to our labor. Some would argue that the lack of such a coherent political project is a direct result of teachers alienated complicity with the status quo and the contradictions inherent in their lack of politics within a highly charged political arena. So rather than exercising a language of economic efficiency and neoliberal accountability, life within schools and society requires a development of a moral, political language that can safeguard
35:24
the dignity and integrity of all human differences intrinsic to a pluralistic nation. More over genuine democracy requires the body's interaction with a social and material world in ways that nurture meaningful and transformative participation. It must exist as a practice in which human beings can interact individually and collectively as empowered subjects of their own lives, and makers of their own destinies. Throughout his life Paulo Freire emphasized
35:52
the significance of love, as well as the importance of ethics in education. He embraced love as an emancipatory and revolutionary principle compelling us to become part of a new decolonizing culture that nurtures human condition, intimacy, trust, and honesty from the body out into the world. In the same vein Shapiro writes with love we affirm and are affirmed in the sociopolitical struggle against death from hunger, disease, exploitation, war, destruction of the earth, and against hopelessness,
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there is great and growing need for our capacity to become body full with love. For Eagleton love means to comprehend the moral and the material as inseparably linked. This constitutes as an essential ingredient of a just society and the political principle that motivates our struggle for social justice and human rights. This is a love grounded in the mutuality and interdependence of our humanity. Also inheriting such a love is an understanding that we as educators are never at liberty
36:53
to be violent or authoritarian. Freire repeatedly argued that ethics is a significant place of departure for both our private and our public lives. It constitutes a political question which in the final analysis is a moral question. For without morality our politics and pedagogy can become an instrument of oppression. But this view of morality should not be confused with moralism. Instead it entails exploring deeply the quality of our sensations, ideas, and practices,
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a process that teachers, students cannot surely accomplish by obstructing life from our social surroundings, our political surroundings, from our cultures, or from our historical, or histories of survival. This requires that educators struggle then to bring together in our classrooms the moral and political, the particular and the universal, acknowledging that nothing can survive in isolation. Hence it is through collective struggles waged in our bodies that consciousness is born.
37:53
Through our actions with students and colleagues and comrades, we come together. Not only for the shifting of consciousness, but for the transformation of material conditions. This requires our participation in the actual settings in which we live and work. To not act in the immediacy of our workplace and lived environment can place us in danger of living out a false consciousness that loses touch with a grief or empathetic feelings that oppression stirs in the human soul.
38:21
The poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a true consciousness is a confession to ourselves of our feelings, a false consciousness disowns them. Ultimately it is this disowning that leads us to the corruption of the mind and the body. Such disowning is the outcome of an over abundance of undermining representations and images in schools and society and the media that repeatedly tell poor working class and racialized populations that our lives are worthless.
38:49
Beckoning us a million ways to abandon ourselves daily to the logic of capitalism. In these times great moral courage is required to voice our dissent against educational policies and practices that betray students from oppressed communities, rendering us disposable and expendable. To transform debilitating conditions within classrooms and societies we need a revolutionary pedagogy solidly committed to the unfettering of the body through embracing
39:16
the liberation of our humanity as central thinking, knowing, and feeling subjects of history. This entails rewriting the body into our understanding of pedagogy through calling forth the establishment of new social, political, and economic conditions. Conditions that reap new possibilities for public schooling. Classroom conditions that begin with a primacy of the body carry possibilities, radical possibilities, for recoonecting students more deeply to their development
39:44
as fully integral human beings. More importantly, since the body is the material foundation of our yearning for human liberation, it is only in our bodies that we can ultimately enact a revolutionary love and change the course of history. Thank you.
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